SXSW Panel Picker: Powered by CloudFlare

Each year, the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Conferences
(sxsw.com) solicit session ideas from the community
for the upcoming event using PanelPicker
(panelpicker.sxsw.com). After submissions
are collected, PanelPicker launches a voting interface that allows the
world to pick what sessions they'd like to see at SXSW. As soon as the
polls open, there is a flood of social media-fueled traffic and all
sorts of other challenges for a small IT team to manage. Earlier this
week the PanelPicker for the 2012 SXSW Festival began taking votes and
traffic to it was intense. That's where CloudFlare came in.

While the site continues to hum along powering millions of page views,
CloudFlare has helped SXSW cut bandwidth use by almost half and
substantially decrease the load on their servers. SXSW manages their own
system security, so they turned CloudFlare's security settings to a low
and just used us for the performance benefits.

You can see the effects of enabling CloudFlare on the SXSW servers for
yourself:

The SXSW conferences are being held in Austin, TX from March 9 -
18. Members of the CloudFlare team are represented
on four proposed panels, so we recommend you test to make sure the
PanelPicker is running fast and smooth yourself by heading over there
and voting up the following proposed panels: